In recent years, image taking devices, such as consumer digital still cameras, video cameras, and built-in cameras of mobile phones, provide increasingly high functionality. These image taking devices support sophisticated image taking, such as rapid continuous shooting, in addition to high-quality recording of photographs and/or videos, for example. An image taking device also automatically assigns meta-information, such as position information for the location of shooting or the name of a person in a photograph or video, for example. An image taking device further has network connection functions and directly uploads taken photographs from the device to a server on a network, for example. A wide variety of such high-functionality image taking devices are now available at low costs.
Popularity of these high-functionality image taking devices is a factor to increase private content handled by an individual (e.g., photographs of a family trip or athletic meet, a video of a recital, etc.). Furthermore, as the image quality or added value of content is improved, the number of contents and size of individual contents are explosively increasing as well.
To share such photographs or videos with family, relatives, friends, or those who attended the event after taking, the one who took the pictures directly sends photograph or video data to them by electronic mail, for example. He also uploads photograph or video data to a server on a network, for example.
These tasks, however, impose an increasing operational burden on the user as the number of people to whom the user wants to send data increases. Thus, to facilitate these tasks, such a scheme is proposed that recognizes and looks up subjects included in individual taken images and assigns addresses that are related to subject data in advance so that the user can send image data to the corresponding person by choosing a person included in an image as a subject (see Patent Literature 1, for instance).